Mmegi

Farewell to a beloved matriarch

Dr Chiepe
Dr Chiepe

For the 10 years that she served her nation as its foremost diplomat, Dr Gaositwe Keagakwa Tibe Chiepe defended human dignity against the violent rancour of apartheid South Africa without firing a shot. By the time the “Nourishing Mother” repaired to the more ‘civilian’ role of Minister of Education, Nelson Mandela was president of a South Africa that stood tall in the comity of civilised nations. Veteran journalist DOUGLAS TSIAKO shares some of the sunshine of her reflections

This Beloved Matriarch lived a richly-fulfilling life in the course of which she served her nation well in various roles, and yet found time to give and receive filial attention and affection. She was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a time when the Cold War was becoming increasingly hot in southern Africa, her country in the eye of the storm of geopolitical conflagrations because it was the most frontline of the Frontline States and found itself in an unavoidable confrontation with the world's most abominable heresy that successive apartheid regimes forced upon the Black majority in South Africa.

It was a measure of her astute command of diplomatic skills that America's civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson - in Botswana as part of a whirlwind tour of southern Africa - aptly remarked that Botswana was "in the belly of the beast" at the end of a meeting with Dr Gaositwe Chiepe. I had done my part in getting Jackson's large entourage to cancel their bookings and storm out of the Gaborone Sun Hotel and Casino in protest shortly after their arrival on September 14, 1986. With the foyer a beehive of activity as Batswana thronged Gaborone Sun to welcome the heroes of America's civil rights movement, I had vaulted onto the counter and made an extemporaneous but impassioned speech about how commandos of apartheid South Africa - come to kill and main people in their sleep in the dead of night - were frequent habitues of the facility; people whose 'sin' was their dedication to the cause of freedom for all and Batswana whose 'crime' was to respond to the international call for third countries and their citizens to give men, material and money to legitimate liberation movements in exercise of the rectitude of resistance to the essential abomination that was apartheid and the barbaric regime in Pretoria that enjoyed the support of the outrageously two-timing United States, Western Europe and Zionist Israel in defiance of the call for more sanctions and total isolation by means of thinly-veiled sanctions-busting and rebel sporting tours. Many years later, I was often fortunate to be able to join Billy Chiepe on visits to Dr Gaositwe Chiepe's tastefully-furnished home that is nestled in the middle of the well-appointed Extension 9 neighbourhood near Northside Primary School in Gaborone, and there bask in the sunshine of her reflections on Botswana's recent history and views on an array of public affairs. Besuited legations

One such nugget was the remarkable contention of Billy’s Rakgadi that the notion of African time - at once lazy and lousy - was a laggard arrival in Botswana and her puzzlement over how quickly Batswana had lost their sense of time and punctuality. She related how one episode that illustrated this had happened one morning in Tokyo at the beginning of a Japan-Africa investment summit when she and her delegation were the only guests to arrive on time at the venue and watched in bemused embarrassment as the rest of the besuited legations sauntered leisurely into the conference hall, their mien one of unconcern that they may be late and confidence in their speeches that would follow and that would, as wonted, be a study in oratorical garnishment. Someone best placed to know about such things had told me something delightfully personal and endearing about this Beloved Matriarch. A couple of years before, Ben Motlhalamme - that high-ranking functionary of Foreign Affairs who always maintained a tricky balance between a devout Catholicism and a good gullet for whisky to obtain an equilibrium that protected his unquestionable sense of duty - had told me how, more than once, Dr Chiepe had remarked, "Leave DiDougsto alone please," when my name had been mentioned in an unhappy tone in Cabinet meetings. This would usually be after a pointed polemic about an excess or a serious omission in the affairs of State committed by someone with a heavy hand or omitted because of some yokel's ineptitude had been the focus of attention in my eponymous weekly personal column in Mmegi.

Exaggerated codes of secrecy

Boet Ben was a career diplomat who had come a long way with the foreign service from the time it was a department in the Office of the President. He and Louis Selepeng, Pelonomi Venson, Dr Edward Maganu – to name just a few for sampling - were a part of that crop of key civil servants that needed no coddling or compulsion of a freedom of information law to share pretty much any lowdown sought without breaking exaggerated codes of secrecy. That was an enabling factor in the work of people like Dr Chiepe who, although the independent press was just past fledgling then, needed an informed public that understood how their nation was "in the belly of the beast" since it was surrounded by apartheid South Africa which, alongside its Western allies, was the cause of the war of liberation in Namibia, the civil wars raging in Angola and Mozambique and to a lesser degree, the political instability in Zimbabwe. She acquitted herself with remarkable comportment, never flinching even in meetings with those damnable dregs of humanity in Pretoria, for hers was the rectitude of resistance motivated by the highest ideals of democracy that were made more urgent by the debasement of humanity that apartheid South Africa sought to ensure with a brutal efficiency borrowed from Nazism. This Beloved Matriarch indeed had the presence of mind and agility of intellect to respond appropriately in situations designed to ensure submission and extract false confessions from the just who live by faith (Habbakuk 2:4). Unfortunately, many of the incidents in which this aplomb came to the fore have – perhaps because of their boorish nature - gone unreported. Related to me and my late friend and colleague, Rampholo Molefhe, by people usually in Dr Chiepe’s deputations was how, at one time almost literally “in the belly of the beast” in Pretoria, a curtain was flung open and out came an Askari to confute Dr Chiepe’s established position that Botswana harboured no terrorists because the country would not allow itself to be used as a springboard for attacks on any of its neighbours, no matter how reprehensible and hateful they may be. It is said the Askari - as apartheid South Africa called trained guerrillas of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe and the PAC’s Azanian People’s Liberation Army now turned by the regime as spies and members of its death squads – had been carefully chosen for the role, he being a man who had lived for many years in Gaborone and thus presumably known to everyone, to Dr Chiepe no less. Unveiling the scoundrel was calculated to achieve maximum points for Pik Botha and his ever-belligerent squad that masqueraded as a diplomatic delegation, possibly for subsequent use before the UN General Assembly where apartheid apologists and backers of the Pretoria regime in the West would be standing ready to range and rail against Botswana but also where the democratic nation commanded the respect, albeit reluctant in some quarters, of the world.

Inhospitable hosts

However, thanks to the perspicacity and unassailable equanimity of Dr Gaositwe Chiepe, the drama proved a damp squib because it is reported that she calmly put it to her inhospitable hosts that it was up to them to decide who to believe between an obvious rascal bought for a few pieces of silver to turn against his people or a nation that had never changed in its principled stance against racial discrimination and inequality. I often wondered if she knew what me and Mphola got up to, in our small way, in advancing the cause for freedom and in the way we found it no barrier to the firmness of our friendship that Mphola had thrown his lot with the PAC and me the ANC. But to be fair to the potential for division that was always a nebulous presence over our heads and everywhere in the community of South Africa exiles, we often shared common ground in the Black Consciousness formations of the wider liberation movement beyond the two main organisations, though Rampholo more so than me because even there we had different interpretations of what those formations stood for. Suffice it to say if Dr Chiepe knew, and we thought she likely did not least because of the fellows on the deputations with whom we shared much to drink and laughter, she did not say and it was not our position to ask. This Beloved Matriarch lived a richly-fulfilling life in the course of which she served her nation well and yet found time to give and receive filial attention and affection. Many can bear me out on the simple truth of this at the family level. As I write this piece of valediction, I have in mind the brothers Monty and Billy to whom she was Rakgadi most adored, who must know more than most that this Beloved Matriarch would have reached the Concourse on High without hindrance. This is not least because for the 10 years during which she was Minister of Foreign Affairs, from 1984 to 1994, she succeeded in keeping the wicked hounds of apartheid at bay without firing a shot.

Brutal cross-border raids

The brutal cross-border raids on Botswana and other independent countries in southern Africa that apartheid South Africa regularly carried out in stark violation of international law were always a reminder of the dear price of freedom and democracy that the people of this relatively small nation were willing to pay, albeit without the military hardware to match the nefarious bullies of white supremacy in Pretoria and their allies in the West who had delayed negotiations for Namibian independence by creating an extraneous issue of removal of Cuban troops from Angola as a condition when the Cuban forces had come to secure the independence and subsequently protect the sovereignty and statehood of Angola after South Africa invaded the country in an attempt to prevent Aghostino Neto and his MPLA from coming to power and continuing to wage war in an attempt to overthrow it after it nevertheless formed the government in November 1975. Such was/is the essential illogic of apartheid and its white-supremacist allies in the West that Dr Chiepe - armed with her conviction in the rectitude of resistance to evil and a deepening in democratic ideals that formed the pillars upon which the nation of Botswana and its people stood firm - had to deal with. By the time she repaired to the more 'civilian' post of Minister of Education in the month of her birth on October 25, 1994, Mandela had become president of a democratic South Africa a few months before on May 10, her job as defender of the struggle for liberation, and then lately as midwife to the birth of a democratic dispensation in place of the damnable heresy of apartheid, done. I am not much versed in eschatology, or the science of last things. For this valid reason, I find myself going back in time to that epic moment made crisper by the downcast mood that prevailed among the people gathered at the National Stadium in Gaborone on July 24, 1980 when the Most Reverend Walter Khotso Makhulu, Anglican Bishop of Botswana and Archbishop of Central Africa, otherwise nicknamed the Church's Secret Agent by Norwegians in reference to his work for the liberation movement, intoned: "The souls of the just are in the hands of God." It was the occasion of the memorial service of the founding president of this republic that had seemed destined to become - as Sir Seretse Khama had himself aptly described the nascent nation - an island of sanity in a sea of madness. The two had Tigerkloof - that Huhudi-based comprehensive school of great influence on the liberation movement and Botswana – for their Alma Mater. She, as the two Latin words translate, would become the “Nourishing Mother” of a nation “in the belly of the beast” and in the end transmogrify the beast into a democratic entity in the comity of civilised nations.

Pope John Paul II

It was because of this that Pope John Paul 11, on a visit that almost coincided with the fact-finding mission of Jesse Jackson to southern Africa in September 1986, described Dr Chiepe’s country as an “island of peace in a troubled sea” when he extolled Batswana for upholding human dignity. The Pope uttered his apostolic blessing of the nation at the National Stadium in Gaborone, echoing the substance of Sir Seretse’s description of his country in relation to the rancour of racism that had encircled Botswana from the onset. Addressing a nation in mourning gathered at the National Stadium in Gaborone just over six years before, another Man of Divinity, Bishop Makhulu, had intoned: “The souls of the just are in the hands of God.” We mourn the departure of Mma Chiepe because she will no longer be in our presence. Even so, we also celebrate her richly-fulfilling life as we bid her goodbye, assured that her soul is in the hands of God because it says so in all Books of Old. As the brothers Monty and Billy know, I am of the Bahaí Faith and accordingly hold that death is a messenger of joy because it is only by it that we can enter the Concourse on High and thus the multi-dimensional world of ineffable joy. That is the destination of Dr Chiepe, who must be gaining near access to God already. Fare thee well, Ma’am.

Editor's Comment
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